


X is for X-ray

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Pretty Little Liars
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-02
Updated: 2016-03-02
Packaged: 2018-05-24 09:49:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6149655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wren remembers his past with Charlotte as he helps her switch Alison and Bethany's dental X-rays.</p>
            </blockquote>





	X is for X-ray

He hoped no one would ever look closely at the X-rays, and would just accept his word for it. Alison and Bethany’s dental work didn’t resemble each other at all, and Wren would just have to hope that no one ever came along saying “That can’t be Alison’s, she never had a fractured jaw”. But he knew the switch had to be made, and the body identified as Alison’s. Because if anyone ever discovered that the body was Bethany, then suspicion was bound to fall on Charlotte, even though Charlotte was technically not guilty of Bethany’s murder. But the motive was there, it was known she had been out of Radley that night, and if anyone looked too hard at Charlotte in connection with Bethany’s disappearance, it was possible that her real crime may come out.

Wren still felt that he had let Charlotte down by not being able to get her out of there as soon as he could have. But he was going to do what it took now to make it up to her for that.

 

His father had been in a mental institution, that much was true. And when Wren explained to Hanna about ambiguous loss, about how someone could be gone and yet still there, he was speaking from experience. 

He just hadn’t told her that the institution in question was Radley.

Most people thought Wren had spent all his childhood in England, and he never disabused anyone of that notion. He had indeed been born there, and he’d gone through high school and university there. That much was on his school records. But nobody looking at his education history would care about the elementary school years, when he’d been living not far from Rosewood. He’d moved to Pennsylvania at age two with his parents, and he had been about seven years old when his father’s condition had deteriorated to the extent that he’d had to be placed in Radley.

The story about how he’d thrown around a lot more than the chair he’d caught Hanna throwing? That was true, too. He remembered getting so frustrated the day he was trying to tell his father about some test he’d aced and his father had addressed him as though he was someone called William that he’d worked with somewhere around 1974, and Wren had ended up shoving a table to the floor and running out of the room. That was the day he had first met Charlotte DiLaurentis, or Charles as she was at the time.

Wren had seen his face before, although the two had never spoken before. He remembered seeing him peeking out from behind a door once as Wren was arriving for his visit to his father, and another time he’d actually wandered into Wren’s father’s room and a nurse had come and taken him away. So when he’d run out of the room and run smack into Charles, and Charles had told him he looked sad and offered to cheer him up, Wren was happy to go.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this,” Charles said. “I tried to stop my sister crying once by giving her a bath, and that’s how I ended up in here.”

That seemed a bit strange to Wren, but he went along with it. After all, Charles was the only person with a kind word for him today. And as they talked, Wren found himself wondering why Charles was even in there, because the way it looked to Wren, Charles seemed pretty sane. Over time, when Wren was visiting his father, any time he needed some time out, he’d go and find Charles.

Charles used to tell Wren of all his plans about how one day, he would get away from Radley, live the life he had always wanted, spend more time with the siblings, Jason and Alison, who were never allowed to visit him. When he and Wren met, they would try and work it out together, how Charles would escape, how they could hang out somewhere a lot more fun than Radley.

Back then, they really believed everything was going to be okay.

When Wren was twelve, his father died, and after that, his mother decided to pack them up and move them back to England. He wrote to Charles a few times, but never heard anything back. Eventually, he stopped writing, but he never forgot his childhood friend.

Once Wren had qualified as a doctor and returned to Rosewood, he found himself wondering a few times why he’d decided to volunteer at Radley. He’d originally decided to do it to help him feel at peace with the way things had been in the last years of his father’s life, with the temper tantrums he’d thrown when he’d thrown the furniture across the room, understanding now as he hadn’t then how distressing it must have been for his father again. He’d only been volunteering a few weeks when someone came up to him, put her hands over her eyes and said “Guess who?”

Wren had spun around to see a blonde woman smiling at him. Although he didn’t think he knew her, there was something about her that was oddly familiar.

“You don’t recognise me. I’m not surprised. You knew me as Charles, but I finally got to be Charlotte, just like I always wanted.”

“Charlotte?” Wren repeated. 

“Yeah, I’m still here. But I’m doing better. They let me take classes at UPenn now. And I’m finally getting to know Jason and Alison, just like I always wanted to back then.”

While Wren was sorry to see that Charlotte was still in Radley, he was genuinely happy that his friend was turning her life around. “If there’s anything I can do to get you out of here for good,” he said, “then you know I will.”

Wren achieved this eventually. But not as soon as he would have hoped. If he had managed to get Charlotte released earlier, and get her away from Bethany so that Bethany couldn’t impersonate her to get out of Radley, maybe none of this would ever have happened. He couldn’t be sure. But that was why he was willing to help Charlotte in all her schemes, why he was prepared to jeopardise his relationship with Melissa over her. Charlotte had helped him through his worst times, now Wren would do the same for her.


End file.
